How CAN 15 minutes' contact with carers a day ever be enough for the elderly?

Shocking: A study has found that some elderly people are receiving just 15 minutes' care a day - leaving them malnourished and in soiled beds and clothes

Society would not allow children to suffer the appalling treatment meted out to the elderly in their own homes, it was claimed said last night.

Charities spoke out after an official investigation found that the basic human rights of pensioners are being neglected.

They warned the situation is likely to worsen because councils are cutting back on social care.

The report – by the Equality and Human Rights Commission – found that elderly people have been allowed to become malnourished or left in soiled beds and clothes.

Sometimes they have to choose between being washed or being fed because visits from home helps are so brief.

Baroness Sally Greengross, an EHRC commissioner, said: ‘The numbers of people requiring care are going up all the time, so we have to put in more resources.

‘We must get this right and human rights is a tool that can help us. There aren’t enough care workers, so they rush from one person to the next.

‘Fifteen minutes is not enough time to give people another aspect of their human rights which is contact with someone else.

‘A lot of older people are just on their own for 24 hours in this country, so that a person coming in is so important as a contact, a friend, someone to talk to.’

She told BBC Breakfast that many home helps were too rushed to do their jobs properly: ‘If you are rushing because you have got 15 minutes you have to choose – do I give them a meal or do I wash them properly, do I make sure that they are happy, that they are content, that they have got someone they can talk to a little?

Concerns: Sally Greengross said more resources were needed because of
the number of people going into care, while Paul Burstow said there was
no excuse for poor care - either at residential homes or in care homes

‘If you don’t have time for that because you are so rushed then you cannot do your job properly.’

Ian Buchan of Independent Age, which helps older people stay in their homes, said the interim report highlighted underfunding.

ABUSE HOSPITAL TO BE CLOSED

A hospital where staff were filmed abusing vulnerable adults will be closed down this week.

Sickening
footage broadcast earlier this month showed residents with learning
difficulties being subjected to barbaric physical and verbal attacks by
their ‘carers’.

The BBC
Panorama film led to condemnation of both the hospital’s owners and the
social care watchdog, both of whom had previously been warned what was
happening.

Yesterday,
Castlebeck, which runs Winterbourne View in Bristol, said the hospital
would close on Friday when the last patients would be transferred to
alternative services.

One staff member was recorded goading patients and threatening them with violence. He later kicked one victim to the ground.

‘It means councils don’t pay agencies enough, and the result is poor quality, ad hoc care, often with minimal management and supervision,’ he added.

‘Staff that are being asked to do a very complex job, with frail and vulnerable older people, receive little training and support and are often forced to rush between cases to save travel time, for which they are not paid.

‘Probably more shocking is that, funding issues aside, this kind of treatment has been accepted for many years. It is a great shame that it takes a human rights watchdog to point out the neglect that local authorities have been aware of for years.

‘We have to ask whether children or younger adults would be treated in this way, and why, in our supposedly civilised society, this is tolerated for older people.’

The National Pensioners’ Convention said the report showed that services for the elderly were deteriorating.

General secretary Dot Gilbson said: ‘The real people to blame are the private companies that are putting profits before residents’ needs.

‘More resources are needed if the care regulator is going to properly protect these individuals and the government has to step in to ensure social care becomes a service and not a business.

‘The social care system is in crisis – poor care, high turnover of staff, an inadequate regulatory and complaints system – all of which the Government seems incapable of addressing. I challenge care minister Paul Burstow to suffer some of the indignities some of our older people are facing.’

Mr Burstow said: ‘There can be no place for poor quality care in care services, either in the home care system or in residential homes.

He said he hoped the EHRC inquiry would help drive up standards.

No food, water or medication: The grim reality of home 'care' for the elderly exposed in an undercover probe

BBC reporter ARIFA FAROOQ (right) went undercover as a carer for the 2009 Panorama expose Britain’s Homecare Scandal. Here she relives her experience and lays bare the horrifying truth about the industry.

The shambles of home care for the elderly was revealed to me in an appalling incident when I was sent to care for a terminally ill man who was doubly incontinent and in great pain.

The only way he could be moved was with a hoist, but I had received little training in the use of such equipment — indeed my only instruction in caring at all had been a few days of seminars and DVDs.

I was completely out of my depth as I looked at the poor man, surrounded by machinery and tubes. He really needed proper medical attention, not an inexperienced carer like me.

Shameful neglect: Dementia sufferer Janet Finn, 89, was left on her own for 24 hours without food and water

I tried to treat him in the most dignified manner I could, but it was so difficult that I had to keep ringing the company office, asking for more support. Yet all my calls kept going through to an answering machine. It is an episode that haunts me to this day.

This incident happened while I was working undercover as a carer, doing an investigation into inadequate home care for BBC’s Panorama. The reality is that thousands of carers have no more experience or support than I did — and their elderly charges are equally neglected.

Others have been abandoned in soiled bed sheets and clothes, or told to choose between being fed or washed

This disgrace was exposed this week by a new report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which revealed how many elderly people are let down by the home care system run by local authorities — their visits curtailed, meals not provided and washing inadequate.

According to the Commission, standards are so appalling in some cases that basic human rights have been breached. The report found that some older people have been left in their beds for 17 hours at a time or have been undressed in their rooms in full view of their neighbours.

Others have been abandoned in soiled bed sheets and clothes, or told to choose between being fed or washed.

The Commission’s study mirrors my own experience working as a domiciliary carer for several months, providing support to a number of elderly clients around Scotland.

As a Muslim, I come from a culture in which the elderly are revered, and young people are taught to show them the deepest respect. But what I found during this undercover experience was shocking.

There was a constant state of pressure and crisis, so that the clients were not given the time they either need or have paid for.

While most patients have their care
financed by the local authority — who outsource the work to private
companies — some clients pay for private care.

Neglected: Andrew Wilson was filmed in the documentary and told a reporter he had not had a bath for six months. The footage showed him being wiped with a flannel as a carer chatted on a mobile

During
the making of the programme the level to which cost-cutting is the
priority for local councils was painfully clear. An online auction
decided South Lanarkshire council’s new care provider.

One of Scotland’s largest care
providers, Domiciliary Care, won the auction — which saw bidders bidding
down, not up. It agreed to provide care for just £9.95 an hour.

I received a few days instruction,
which was hardly sufficient for the complexity of my clients’ needs.
Then I was thrown in at the deep end, expected to cope with extremely
vulnerable, sometimes very ill people

The
company I worked for was the fourth largest in Scotland, yet there was
always a sense of being short-staffed, of being rushed off your feet, of
always desperately trying to cram in all our tasks, of not being aware
of the real needs of our clients.

It
was clear to me that the quality of care is massively compromised by
the determination of commercial firms to make as much money as possible
out of looking after the elderly.

Care
is dominated by profit-making companies, with independent providers now
controlling 70 per cent of the market. The sector is said to be worth
at least £1.5 billion and is growing all the time, due to the ageing
British population.

But the ever-more-lucrative nature of the market does not mean that the elderly are receiving a better deal. Far from it.

I should stress that all the carers I worked with were devoted to their jobs. They all wanted to do the best they could.

But, just as the Commission reported, they were up against a cash-orientated, corner-cutting system that meant that they could not do their work properly.

Bad experience: Hayley Cutts was another Panorama journalist who worked in a care home - despite having just four days basic training

Many of our clients were bed-bound and needed intensive support, from the cleaning of their beds and changing their sheets, to feeding them and getting them dressed.

To give a client a proper bath, for instance, could easily take half an hour, yet sometimes we had to be in and out of the home in five minutes, rushing off to the next client. The schedule was ridiculous, compounded by the lack of time allowed by the company for travelling.

Nor was the logistic support adequate. For a start, we were given little training. Before I began my job, I received a few days instruction, which was hardly sufficient for the complexity of my clients’ needs. Then I was thrown in at the deep end, expected to cope with extremely vulnerable, sometimes very ill people.

There were other problems which made the system all the worse. One was the huge turnover in staff, which meant that the clients would be facing a bewildering array of new faces every week, hardly a way of establishing confidence.

And thanks to the chaotic rota
system, these different carers would often know nothing about the needs
of specific clients. We sometimes got into the ridiculous position of
having to ask people what they required, which was hopeless if they were
suffering from dementia.

This kind of difficulty should have
been overcome by the official rule that every client was meant to have
an individual care plan, setting out in detail all their needs.

But these were often inadequate or even missing from the home of the client, which meant that we were operating in the dark. The casualness about the plans was indicative of the mess the system was in.

I remember seeing a pile of them lying on the back seat of a manager’s car — despite the fact they were meant to be highly important and confidential.

But that was hardly unique. A fellow Panorama reporter, Hayley Cutts, also went undercover and her experience was as bad as mine. Again, she was pushed into a front-line job after just four days of training and, like me, she found that the amount of time set aside for visits was inadequate.

One of the firms Hayley worked for was Care UK, which had 15,000 clients and 48 contracts around the country when the programme was made.

A graphic symbol of the appalling care provided by this firm was the case of Janet Finn, an 89-year-old woman from Hertfordshire who suffered from dementia and double incontinence, meaning that she required three home care visits a day, each lasting for at least half an hour.

Yet one day in June 2008, her visits were skipped entirely. For 24 hours she had no food, no water, no medication and was left sitting in her own faeces and urine. She was found by her son in this terrible state of neglect.

Partly as a result of the outrage over this case, Hertfordshire got rid of Care UK, though the firm still operates elsewhere. And the abuses continue.

In a civilised society, the impulse of compassion should be the driving force behind the care of the elderly. Those who have given so much to our society deserve to be treated with respect and dignity in their final years when they are at their most vulnerable.

Yet the recent scandals over abuses in residential homes, the maltreatment of older patients in NHS wards and now the home care revelations show that this is clearly not what is happening.

It is one of the tragic paradoxes of our society that our civic institutions and judicial system continually trumpet their commitment to human rights.

Indeed, the human rights agenda has become one of the central themes of modern civic life. Yet, when it comes to the rights of the elderly, they seem to have been forgotten.